Announcing our newly enhanced Customer Portal

Back in November of last year, I was part of a conference call with a European customer who needed some high level reassurance from us. As part of that request, they mentioned that our customer portal could not help them properly manage support tickets. Thus, I hijacked the call and started a GoToMeeting session from my desktop. I gave them the opportunity to walk me through exactly what they found problematic about our customer portal. For the next 20 minutes they did a masterful job of highlighting what areas of the customer portal simply weren’t working for them. And If put myself in their shoes, I could see that they were not only right, but it was likely that other customers felt this way and had never said anything to us.

With this knowledge, I did something radical, which was to hold many meetings over the next two months where I would bring a proof of concept to the table, and have the customer critique it. This helped us to get to where we are today. Which is, to announce the release of Phase One of our enhanced customer portal.

Let me walk you through the changes that we’ve made to help us to help you better.

The first two changes that I’ve highlighted are two fields named Customer’s Internal Notes and Customer’s Internal Case Number. The purpose of both these fields is to allow you to document items, such as your own internal case number, and any notes related to this ticket. The key thing that I’d like to point out about these fields is that we at WinMagic cannot see what is in these fields. Thus, they are totally your fields to do with as you wish.

This next section allows you to provide us details about the hardware that you’re using, the type of encryption that you’re trying to perform, and the operating system, among other items. I want to focus on one specific area:

This section will allow you to specify what part of our product that you are having issues with. The current list of options that you can choose from includes:

As you choose the part of SecureDoc that you are having issues with, only options relevant to that section of the product will subsequently appear. For example, when I choose BitLocker, these are the only options that appear:

And the same is true for the menu below:

All of this will drive some logic behind the scenes that will allow you to drill down and specify the exact part of SecureDoc that you are using. It will also allow our support agents to rapidly zero in on what might be the cause of the issue that you’re having. Some of that logic is already in place, but more will come in part of Phase Two of this enhancement to our customer portal. You won’t see the changes, but it will make it easier for us to help you better.

Another change that I would like to highlight is the SD Release area:

Here, you can specify the release of SecureDoc that you are using, along with the number of affected clients or servers. Our Support Agents like to get that information up front as it helps them narrow down on the concerns more quickly, resulting in better service to you.

Once you save the case, it will immediately enter our support queue, and an agent will respond to your case in a timely manner. When the Support Agent posts a response, you’ll receive an automatic notification via email. Plus, you’ll be able to track your communication here:

As you can see, the communication in the Case Comments section is visible. And above that, any knowledge base articles will be attached to the case, making it easy for you to see.

All of these changes that I have outlined above are available, as of today. And, because I know that these changes are significant, if you have any questions about them, please feel free to reach out to me personally at kevin.david@winmagic.com. I will do my best to answer your questions.

In the meantime, I would encourage you to visit and use our enhanced customer portal. I am confident that these changes will make it easier for you to interact with us here at WinMagic Technical Support – a win-win for all parties.

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Kevin David is Sr. Manager of Technical Support who not only loves technology, but getting the most out of himself and others around him. To do this he leverages his past experiences in everything from startups to Fortune 500 companies which gives him a very broad base to work from. When he’s not online, Kevin is offline either Nordic skiing or road cycling with his wife Angela. Writing for the SecureSpeak blog gives Kevin another opportunity to freely share his experience with others, which is something he loves to do. Kevin David

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